Getting back into PyQt and not loving it.

[llanitedave]

On Sunday, June 26, 2016 at 2:45:18 PM UTC-7, Michael Torrie wrote:
> I'm starting to question the advice I gave not long ago to for new users
> to consider the Qt toolkit with Python.
> 
> I just did a little project porting a simple graphical user interface
> from GTK+ to Qt (PyQt4 for now as that's what I have installed).  For
> the most part it worked out pretty well.  It's been a while since I used
> PyQt or PySide, and I had forgotten what a horrid Python experience Qt
> really is, at least in PyQt4.  Maybe the bindings for Qt5 are better...
> I'll be working with them next as I convert my working code.
> 
> Qt's a fantastic toolkit, and the most mature of any of them, and the
> most portable, but man the bindings are not Pythonic at all. PyQt does
> not seem to hide the C++-isms at all from the programmer.  I am
> constantly wrapping things up in Qt classes like QRect, QPoint, QSize,
> etc, when really a python Tuple would have sufficed.  All the data
> structures are wrapped in Qt C++ classes, so you end up writing what is
> really idiomatic C++ code using Python syntax. Not the best way to code
> Python!  Implementing signals in a class, too, reminds you strongly that
> you're working with C++ as you have to construct their method signatures
> using types that map back into C++.

Not sure that wxPython is really any different in that respect, and Tkinter doesn't feel Pythonic to me, either -- considering how it's Tk at heart.  So what's the alternative?  There really is no good Python-based GUI tool, and that's a shame.